Characterization of a radial laser scanner for mobile robot navigation

A radial laser scanner is a device that provides distances to the surrounding objects by scanning the environment in a plane (usually parallel to the ground). This paper is concerned with the calibration of one of such a sensor, called the Explorer. In particular we present a probabilistic sensor model that considers the sensor readings to be affected by Gaussian noise as well as truncated by the sensor resolution. We also describe some experiments aimed to characterize the range measurements against the operating time, different target materials, beam incidence angle, etc. A brief analysis of the angular error is also presented